Generally, merchants are charged transaction fees for accepting credit card or debit card transactions, and the transaction fees are usually a larger percentage for smaller payment amounts as compared to larger payment amounts. For instance, some transaction fees charged by some card association systems may be a fixed fee for a transaction under a set payment amount; otherwise, the card association system may set the transaction fee as a percentage of the payment amount. For instance, the fixed fee may be $0.25 for any transaction under ten dollars, or may be 1% of the payment amount for any transaction under 10 dollars. Alternatively, some transaction fees charged by some card association systems may be a fixed fee plus a percentage of a payment amount for the transaction. For instance, the fixed fee may be one dollar plus 1% of the payment amount. Therefore, merchants that process many small transactions may incur disproportionally high transaction fees relative to merchants that do not receive as many small transactions. Therefore, merchants that process many small transactions may wish to avoid processing many small transactions.
Moreover, the communication load, processing load, and energy costs for merchant systems, transaction processor systems, card association systems, and banking systems (e.g., issuing bank systems and merchant bank systems) may be substantial when processing transactions that have small payment amounts. For instance, to process an authorization request and approval for each transaction: (1) the merchant systems may generate a first message and/or transmit the first message to the transaction processor systems; (2) the transaction processor systems may generate and transmit an acknowledgement, process the first message, and/or transmit a second message to the card association systems; (3) the card association systems may generate and transmit an acknowledgement, process the second message, and/or transmit a third message to banking systems; and (4) the banking systems may process the third message, approve or decline the transaction, and/or transmit a fourth message back to the merchant systems, the transaction processor systems, or the card association systems. Therefore, merchant systems, transaction processor systems, banking systems, and card association systems may wish to reduce a total number of transactions so as to reduce over all communication loads, processing loads, and energy costs. Also, merchant systems may wish to reduce communication loads, processing loads, and energy costs, while also avoiding the transaction fees associated with small payment amounts.
Furthermore, user wait times during a transaction may cause problems for merchants. For instance, if the network connection of the point-of-sale (POS) device is poor or slow (e.g., such that transmissions take a long period of time), or if the process time required is long, the merchant may lose business or be negatively associated with the long period of transmission time and/or the long process time. Therefore, merchants may want to reduce user wait times during a transaction.
The present disclosure is directed to overcoming one or more of these above-referenced challenges.